‘Gotten WORSE Since Jim Crow?’ Ben Shapiro And Bill Maher Team Up Battling Bakari Sellers Over Racism In America

Bill Maher and Ben Shapiro teamed up against Bakari Sellers on Friday’s edition of Real Time on HBO after the former Democratic congressman claimed race relations were worse in 2024 than they were in 1954.

The odd pairing occurred on the latest Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO, during a broad discussion about race and as Sellers claimed America’s systems of governance are designed to disadvantage Black Americans.

After Sellers claimed he and his family and many others had been victims of “systemic racism,” Shapiro asked him if he believed Black America was treated worse currently and collectively than it was in 1960.

“Yes,” Sellers said.

Shapiro pressed Seller, asking him, “Systemic racism has gotten worse since Jim Crow?”

Sellers doubled down on his argument when he said:

“Let me let me also let me also tell you this. A lot of times when we talk about racism, we only talk about the fact when somebody calls you [a racial slur]. But very rarely do we talk about the systems of injustice and oppression we have in this country. Where I’m from, Denmark, South Carolina. You don’t have clean water, right? I lived in a food desert. I grew up in a food desert where you can’t go a mile or two and have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The schools are falling apart. The infrastructure is eroding.

Shapiro then asked, “Bakari, is your life as a Black man better or worse than it would have been if you had been born in 1920, in the United States?”

“All you have to do is ask my father, who literally was shot in the Orangeburg massacre,” Sellers fired back. “He will tell you today that he feels like this country’s in 1954.”

Maher then cut in and sided with Shapiro.

‘That doesn’t mean it is,” the host said, which sent his live studio audience into applause.” You said he ‘feels that way.’ That’s ridiculous. It is.”

Sellers then castigated both Maher and Shapiro and said neither had any true understanding of the experience of Black Americans.

Maher, replied, “I have to object to that – I cannot, I cannot talk about it because I am not part of a group?”

“I am a sentient human being,” Maher added before he accused Sellers of not being able to see the issue without bias.

“You’re right, Maher said. “There’s two ways you can not understand something. One is to be too far from it. We’re too far from it. We can’t see like you can. One is to be too close to something, and then sometimes you can’t see it accurately, either.”

The conversation grew tense after Sellers accused Maher of “discounting” his father’s experiences with racism.

“I’m not discounting it,” Maher replied. “And to say it was silly.”

Shapiro argued Sellers could not justify his father’s life to claim he had been oppressed as the two had grown up in different eras of American history.

“If I were to say to you as a Jew that the experience of Jews in the United States today is worse than the experience of Jews in Europe in 1939, I would not be stating accurately,” Shapiro argued. “It’s not true. And it’s also not true to say that the experience of Black people in America in 2024 is worse on a general level than the experience of Black men, because in 1954, in Alabama – which is crazy.”

Sellers fired back, “I think that’s genuinely, intellectually dishonest.”

After some more back-and-forth about the advancement of opportunities fro Black America, Shapiro called Sellers “radically disingenuous.”

Watch the clip above via HBO .